My book in Russian

published: Wed, 28-Jan-2004   |   updated: Thu, 27-Oct-2005

Holy cow! I don't believe it! My book's been translated into Russian! This is just fantastic!

Forgive my enthusiasm here. I'd known that my book had been translated, after all I'd get e-mails from developers around the world asking questions about the material and about the implementations. So I knew it had been translated into Portuguese and into Chinese for example.

Well, I was just browsing my web logs (as one does), making sure that everything is running smoothly, minimal 404s, checking up on hacking attempts, etc, when I came across the list of referrers. Now, these days a lot of visitors come directly to my web site, but nevertheless I get linked.

Anyway, there was a link from a Russian link site (at least I think it is). It's essentially a set of links, updated daily, with interesting development stories (I guess). And there was the link to my site for a recent article I'd written. In browsing around, I decided to click on an obvious link to a bookstore (books.ru). Lots of cyrillic splashed across the screen, but it looked a bit like Amazon, so I thought, why not, and entered 'Delphi' in the search box and pressed Enter. (The link I'd followed to the bookstore had the word Delphi in Latin characters so I wasn't completely off-base in trying a word in the Western alphabet.)

More cyrillic, but it was obvious that this was a list of books; there were cover images, titles, and author names. Titles and author names in cyrillic, of course. Bugger.

I stare at the screen. What was B in cyrillic? What about J? Haven't a clue. I page through the books, in the hope that I would recognize the cover of my book (not as daft as it sounds, I's already recognized Ray Lischner's Delphi in a Nutshell). No go after 6 pages. So I go back to the beginning and start looking at the author names, trying to match cyrillic characters to sounds (when I was at University doing maths, my flat-mate was doing Russian and Eastern European Studies, and I learned some of the characters).

Suddenly, there it was (in fact, right underneath Lischner's book): Фундаментальные алгоритмы и структуры данных в Delphi. Author: Бакнелл Д.. "Baknell D." indeed. (Actually, further investigation shows that my name written in cyrillic is Джулиан М. Бакнелл with the first two letters of my forename producing the zh sound.)

I found a translation site that worked for Russian-English. The book's title translates to (after a little word rearrangement) Fundamental Algorithms and Data Structures in Delphi. Bingo! (That's the cover image just above.)

It's even been rated by 4 people with the full five stars. (Спасибо, каждый.) It's number 63 in their sales rating. It's 262 roubles. It's bloody fabulous.

I need to get a copy. Can anyone help? (Update: Thanks to everyone — Спасибо каждому — who replied to help out. Igor Dorovskoy was more than kind to send me a copy as a gift, providing that I autograph another copy and send it back. Done!)